Bon Appétit! This week, our appetizer special is tuna tartare! Though the project is starting to ramp up our appetites, the citrusy sting of Lens Studio is burning us up inside a little bit.
The storm of week 3 came in faster than the cold in Pittsburgh. Brainstorming sessions prepared us for Quarters as we explored multiple directions for potential prototypes. All we knew was that we had a few key points we had to meet, but beyond those logistics, we had a lot of creative freedom. We needed the experience to be about socializing, we needed it to be multiplayer, and we needed it to seamlessly lead into a meal. With this, we dove down three distinct paths that were storyboarded individually by each of our team members.
First, we looked at a narrative path to explore the origins of spices or foods. This experience leaned on education and living in the space of very fine dining, focusing on ingredients in food and pride in cultural history.
The second experience was a modern-day socializing experience. Leaning into the strengths of Snapchat and face filters, we figured we could decorate drinks and present them to others at the table as a sort of communal craft.
The third experience was playing a party game, inspired by modern party games like Charades, Two Truths and a Lie, or group puzzles. We wanted to explore the possibilities of gamifying a ritual before dinner.
Truth be told, none of them really got our stomachs growling, and Quarters did an incredible job of making these ideas seem as unappetizing as we knew them to be. There was one epiphanic tip that came from Quarters, and it was leaning into how we truly take what’s real and what’s virtual and find the right space in that Venn diagram to create something magical. We experienced this early on when Kelin drew rain in the finger-painting experience under the eyewash and chemical wash station. Vivian Shen mentioned that the use of weight and physical objects that somehow interacted with AR is the real meal we should be making.
Following Quarters and this revelation, we were brought in by Mike to play party games and board games that got our prototyping brains started. Whoonu, Apples to Apples, and ImaginIFF gave us insight into conversational board games and sparked a hunger to move these known, working games into an AR space.
We came up with a prototype to build next week, where players would sit around a round table with a lazy susan in the middle. Like in the party games that we tried, each player would receive a prompt and have objects in front of them that they could select to answer them. We think it will be fun for players to submit their answers by putting digital items on the lazy susan and using the motion of spinning a real object to interact with the game, and we will experiment with other types of interactions we can implement to effectively blend the physical and digital worlds in exciting ways.